Degradation

It describes the progressive reduction in a system's ability to function effectively. As incoherence accumulates, resources get misallocated, signals become less reliable, and the system needs more effort just to maintain what it used to do without trying. A piece of equipment kept running through patch after patch, instead of a proper repair, doesn't announce the moment it becomes unreliable — it just costs a little more to operate each month, until the day it doesn't run at all. The early stages are genuinely hard to detect from inside the system, because operations continue. What changes first is the cost of continuing them, not whether they continue.

This tends to get normalized precisely because it's gradual. A system adjusts to reduced performance the same way a person adjusts to a slowly dimming light — each individual step down is small enough to accept as the new baseline, so the cumulative loss never registers as a single, alarming event. What was once considered a problem quietly becomes what's simply expected.

This is often the first real signal that something is wrong — arriving well before any dramatic failure does, and easy to miss precisely because nothing dramatic is happening yet. The earlier it's caught, the smaller the correction needed; the longer it's allowed to continue under a normalized baseline, the more structural reorganization it eventually takes to reverse. Catching it early isn't about waiting for capacity to visibly drop — it's about noticing when maintaining the same output has started requiring more than it used to.